The best video games of the year

In the second year in a row with the pandemic, video games have reaffirmed their centrality in everyday life. The sector has not only shown off an economic boost due to the more or less stringent restrictions on mobility and the new habits imposed by the health crisis; it also reaffirmed its socio-cultural importance and a role of pre-mediation, that is, able to anticipate many of the future scenarios, immersing players from all over the world.

‘This is not a game’ warns a sign near the entrance door. Dante’s ‘Leave all hope, you who enter’ comes to mind, but what is it? Perhaps an ironic reflection on what a videogame really is? To be fair it’s all three together, and much, much more.

Radiohead Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is in fact a virtual and interactive museum that celebrates the reissue of two, now classic, albums by Tom Yorke’s band, Kid A and Amnesiac. In a brutalist architecture, amidst buzzing cathode-ray tube televisions, Byzantine corridors and fluttering drawn pages, the player, the new Dante, can wander around surrounded by crepuscular presences and modify, with his own actions, the sound landscape It should not be surprising that so many video games such as Plague Inc were talking about health apocalypses, as early as 2012, but not even that today, as confirmed in a recent interview by the CEO of Newzoo, Peter Warmar, the technological giants are doubling their production in the recreational field.

The games we are about to show you are the ones that best represent 2021, selected precisely by weighing their intrinsic artistic quality, the ability to represent contemporary socio-cultural instances and to predict (not yet) mass phenomena and technologies. Here they are below.